Guess the Emoji Quiz: 15 Movies, Songs and Words

Guess the emoji, fifteen times: six movies, five songs, four plain words. Your mom's Tuesday text was harder, and she meant every pumpkin. Question 15 is where I got mean. After each pick you'll see why the answer fits, so a wrong guess still teaches you how these rows work.

No timer here, and no signup, because I wanted something you could finish in a checkout line at Target with a cart full of Halloween candy and one free thumb.

How Do You Play Guess the Emoji?

Out loud, mostly. I'm serious. A row of emoji is a rebus, the old puzzle where pictures stand in for sounds, so your ears solve more of it than your eyes do. Key plus board? Stare at it and you see a skate park. Mumble it at the kitchen table, though, and you're looking at your laptop.

Four tricks crack most rows, from what I've seen writing these:

The trick	How it works	From this quiz
Sound it out	Each picture is a syllable	Butter plus fly
Name the plot	Each picture is a scene	Ship, iceberg, broken heart
Name the star	One picture is the main character	Lion and crown
Color plus thing	A color changes the noun	Purple heart, rain cloud
Quote it	The row is a famous line	Alien, phone, home

Okay, five. Quoting a film only works in one question here, so I nearly left it out, but E.T. would've had words with me.

Guess the Movie by Emoji: Answers

Spoilers below, obviously. Play first. I can't stop you, but I'll know.

Question	What the row shows	Answer
1	Lion, crown	The Lion King
2	Ship, ice, broken heart	Titanic
3	Magnifying glass, fish	Finding Nemo
4	Alien, phone, house	E.T.
5	Shark, beach, scream	Jaws
6	Ring, volcano, elf	The Lord of the Rings
Bonus	House, boy, scream	Home Alone
Bonus	Ogre, onion	Shrek
Bonus	Snowflake, princess, snowman	Frozen
Bonus	Lightning, glasses, wand	Harry Potter
Bonus	Cowboy, spaceman, toy box	Toy Story

The bonus rows didn't make the quiz, so steal them for a party. Question 3 is the one I'd pick for a kid's birthday. Question 6 trips up anybody who's only seen The Hobbit, because a ring alone won't settle it. The volcano has to do the work, since Bilbo spends a whole book on the road with that ring and never gets within a day's ride of Mount Doom.

Guess the Song by the Emoji: Answers

Question	What the row shows	Answer	Artist
7	Purple heart, rain cloud	Purple Rain	Prince
8	Rocket, man	Rocket Man	Elton John
9	Dancer, crown	Dancing Queen	ABBA
10	Eye, tiger	Eye of the Tiger	Survivor
11	Ice, ice, baby	Ice Ice Baby	Vanilla Ice

Songs are harder than movies for a boring reason. A film has a plot you can draw, and a pop song has a title and a feeling. Nouns got me through. Bohemian Rhapsody in emoji? Good luck, and send a postcard.

Guess the Word by Emoji: Answers

Question	What the row shows	Answer
12	Sun, flower	Sunflower
13	Star, fish	Starfish
14	Butter, fly	Butterfly
15	Key, board	Keyboard

I picked compound words on purpose, because they're fair. You get two pictures for one word, with no arguing at the table about whether a mushroom can mean "fun guy." Skateboard sits in question 15's choices as bait, and I'm not sorry.

What Your Score Means

Get 0 to 5 and you're Still Sending Thumbs Up. A 6 to 9 makes you a Group Chat Regular. Most people land there, still squinting at question 14. Then 10 to 13 is Fluent in Emoji. A 14 or 15 earns Emoji Whisperer, and I'd like to know what you're doing with your evenings.

The last screen turns your score into fancy text for a bio or a family thread, and the link button sends the same fifteen rows to whoever's been bragging.

Make Your Own Emoji Riddles

Three or four pictures, tops. A six-emoji row isn't a puzzle anymore, it's a hostage note. Pick your answer first and hunt for the one object nothing else could mean. Your brother-in-law gets the first try. If he's guessing Shrek for Titanic, go again.

Need a head start? Our Emoji Translator turns a whole sentence into emoji and reads them back too, so it'll hand you a first draft you can cut down.

Pictures standing in for sounds is a very old idea, by the way. The rebus goes back to ancient Egypt, where a drawing of a thing could also spell the sound of its name. That's why our hieroglyphics translator feels a bit like this quiz with a much longer history.

Emoji Game Questions People Ask

What's the answer to guess the movie by the emoji? Ours are The Lion King, Titanic, Finding Nemo, E.T., Jaws and The Lord of the Rings. Rows elsewhere vary. Found a row somewhere else? Read each picture aloud, then try the title.

Is there a guess the Disney movie by emoji round? Sort of. Questions 1 and 3 are The Lion King and Finding Nemo, and that's as Disney as this one gets. A full Disney round would need a lot more princess emoji than Unicode has to give.

Is this emoji guessing game free? Yep. No app and no account. You can play it on a bus with one thumb, and a phone from the last few years will show every picture.

Why is one emoji showing as a box? Old phone, most likely. The fly in question 14 only arrived in 2020, and a system older than that has nothing to draw. Updating fixes it. If you can't, that row is butter plus fly.

What are emoji riddles? Word puzzles in pictures. Two or three emoji hide a title or a phrase, and you mutter at your phone till one clicks. Sunday school teachers swear by them, for reasons I've never asked about.

How do you play emoji Pictionary? Teams, a phone and a list of titles. One player types a row of emoji for a movie, and the others shout till someone gets it. Keep a two-minute limit, or your uncle will take the whole night.

Want a different kind of guessing? The Guess the Language Quiz does the same thing with alphabets, and there's more on the quizzes page.